Faq

Have a question? Read this short list of our most frequently asked questions to see if you can get an answer! For more information about Bento Cam, or if you need support, please email us directly at support@heybento.com. We look forward to hearing from you!

General

Bento Cam is a camera app for iOS that seeks to solve one of the major emergent effects of the super powerful smartphone revolution: The explosive number of photos people take for work and life
The app helps users capture, organise and use all these photos in a fast and productive way by instantly organising them into collections that can be connected to existing workflows (e.g. Dropbox, Google Drive).

Bento Cam is completely free! And all the functionality that you have in the current version of the app will stay free, forever. We might release a premium version of Bento Cam with added features and functionality at a later date, stay tuned!

The first inkling of an idea came to co-founders Angie and Rasmus after having attended South by Southwest conference in 2015 as part of their previous jobs as consultants. The amount of photos taken at the event from everything to the “important” - photos of slides from the different speaker events, business cards, to the “fun” photos - the food shots, party pics, etc. proved hard to manage, and share after the event, when photos had to be located and used for different purposes. But for Angie, this never ended up happening as her phone got stolen and the photos never lived up to their true potential. And the idea for Bento Cam was born!

The “Bento” part of Bento Cam is derived from the Japanese style lunch box with rice, meat, fish, etc. called “bento box”. A bento box is neatly organized into different compartments which is exactly what we hope to help you do with Bento Cam. Once you have a home for each kind of photo, you’ll always know where to put them and find them again.

Google Photos is undoubtedly a great service with 100+ million users and it might meet all your photo organization and management needs. In that case, you don’t really need Bento Cam.
But if you’re like us and don’t feel that machine learning gives you the ability to customize collections the way you want to, then Bento Cam might be for you. For us, the important thing is remembering why you took a photo, and where it needs to go (i.e.: photobook, specific Google Drive folder etc.). Sometimes finding it by date and location isn’t always enough nor are generic auto-tags such as “beach”, “dog” and “sky”.
Moreover, most people use a whole suite of different services to manage photos for work and life (egg. iOS photos for personal photos, Google Drive for work stuff), and Bento Cam just wants to help you put your new photos there directly. No need to email them to yourself, download them and organize them later.

You are always welcome to contact us at support@heybento.com, we always love to hear from our Bento Cam family! Or if you have the app downloaded, just head straight to the “Settings” area and scroll down to “Contact Us”. You can always start a conversation with us there and we would be happy to answer as soon as we can!

App-related

Absolutely! You can take a single shot and send that to a collection instantly or just keep tapping the shutter button to continue taking photos. You can also review all the photos and delete the ones you don’t want to keep before sending it to a collection.

In Bento Cam, collections are basically a group of photos that belong together. You can create as many or as few as you want, but of course we always recommend creating collections that are as specific as possible so you don’t have to reorganize them later.
For example, "Inspiration" can be a collection of things you love, but if you take lots of inspiration photos, be specific and say "Inspiration for living room" or "Colour inspiration" or even "Office design inspiration". So that when the new office is done, you can always get rid of the collection without losing other inspiration photos.

For the times where you just know that you will be using the same collection over and over again (e.g.: conference or at a wedding), don’t worry about having to tap the same collection each time you take a photo. When you are on camera mode, simply slide the screen to the left to enable Preset mode! Choose/create a collection and enjoy taking photos knowing they are already organized and saved to the right place.

For now, Bento Cam integrates with iOS Photos (locally), Dropbox and Google Drive. But we plan on integrating with more services later. Do you have a service you’d love to see on Bento Cam? Please let us know!

Only you and the people you share folders with through Google Drive and Dropbox. Bento Cam doesn't store any of your photos locally and has no access to them. The only reason we ask for access is so that we have the permission to save your photos to your iOS albums as well as retrieve them in order to show them to you again in your collection view.

Yes they are! We don't want to compromise on the quality. So the original photo you take from your phone is the version that is saved to your phone as well as to third party services such as Dropbox or Google Drive.

It is only possible to change the name and colour of a collection for now. Changing the location takes a bit of work to manage photos and exporting them for the user on the backend and we certainly don't want to move chunks of your photos across the web. But for now, you can create as many collections as you need to send new photos to the place it needs to go.

Absolutely! Just click on the Dropbox or Google Drive cell when you create a new collection. From there you can either choose the default location which is /Bento/Collection Name or choose a custom folder!

Yes! Simply create a new collection by tapping the “+” sign when you see it, then select the icon with the arrow pointing down to “Import Existing Album”. A list of your albums will appear. Just choose the one you want and click the checkmark. Your iOS album is now a collection in Bento Cam!

Yes! Open the “Collection Settings” for your chosen collection and from here select “Export to a new collection ... ”. You will then have both your original iOS collection as well as the new collection with exported photos. You can then choose to delete the old collection with all photos on iOS once your photos are all exported to the new location! Should you need to cancel the export at any time, you can tap it to cancel easily.